Ed was able to slink out of the bed undetected before the sun peeked over the horizon. The streets were barren, allowing him to shift the majority of his focus to his thoughts.
He stepped through the front door and tossed his keys onto the coffee table.
He paced around the living room for a minute, then stopped in front of his piles of literature. He carefully pulled one from a stack, its antique leather cover cracked, surrounding ephemeral handwritten pages. He carried it flat with both hands and plopped down on the floor against the couch.
As he ran his hands across the front of it, he raised his head and stared off. His expression was blank but his mind was anything but.
He was furious at himself. Since ending up here, he had been carving himself out a not exactly happy, but tolerable, solitary existance, content with drifting through the rest of his life somewhat aimlessly, his sole companionship the memories and the faces that haunted him.
He wondered whose cruel joke it was that he should encounter the same face, the face that tormented him the most, the face he saw every single night in his dreams, the face he loved above all else, here of all places.
Was it Fate then? Some preordained destiny he couldn't predict because it wasn't predictable and that was the point? Was there another, more scientific explanation, some magnetic force drawing them to one another?
Ed didn't want to subscribe to any hogwash like Fate, or to some omniscient, elevated entity pulling strings like a cruel puppetmaster.
But he had no other theories. How statistically possible was it that he should find him? Who was 'him?' He only knew deep in his core that he wasn't The Him.
He shook his head roughly and cast his chin down to consult the book.
His eyes darted across the pages, searching for some arcane piece of knowledge that would make all this make sense, one Truth to quell his doubts, to give him even an ounce of clarity.
He finally landed on a page toward the back. By the dappled orange light of the rising sun he pored over the section, index finger dragging beneath every line. As he read, his eyebrows furrowed, the swath of flesh between them creasing.
Without warning he slammed the book shut, violently throwing it across the room where it slammed against the wall and landed in a beaten heap on the floor.
Ed screamed, agony hurling from his chest at a deafening volume. And for the first time in a long time, he hugged his knees to his chest and sobbed.